Episode 14: Style Studies

The speaker welcomes the audience to the Cup of Creativity in the Literary Lounge and discusses the topic of style studies in writing. They mention famous examples and influences, and how studying different styles can strengthen one's writing. They also give shout-outs to the Advanced Learning Library and Faith Publishing, Inc. The speaker emphasizes the importance of every story being told and invites listeners to join their publishing company. They then talk about the concept of style studies, using examples from music and art, and how it can be applied to writing. They discuss playing with language, plot structure, and different authors' styles as a way to examine and improve one's own writing. Welcome. I hope you have your cup of creativity. Mine today is a blueberry tea. Anyway, welcome to the Cup of Creativity in the Literary Lounge, a place where writing doesn't have to stop. I am your host, Kenza Faith, and today I would like us to discuss the topic of style studies. What are they? So I want to talk about what they are and why this is important. And I'll give you some famous examples and maybe some influences, and then I'll finally address how this can strengthen your craft, your art of writing. But, before I dive into that, let me give my couple shout-outs. Of course, the first one goes to the Advanced Learning Library in Wichita with their stupendous Lime Green AV Studio room where I record this lovely podcast. I just dig this room. I wish you guys could see it. Maybe one of these days I'll figure out how to record a video, which is terrifying. But, you know, maybe you can see what I can see and you can actually watch how this is all done. I don't know. So I really want to say thank you to them, and I want to celebrate today because all of their computers are back up and running. Last time I was in here, the City of Wichita and some other offices were recovering from a cyber attack. I know, kind of crazy. Anyway, when I came here last time, the library, everything was down, and these amazing librarians and technicians and whatnot, I mean, they can find you a book by searching out a call number in a different library. I don't know. I just think that's amazing. Not to mention, they're super handy when I'm trying to figure out which switch I need to take. So, anyway, I wanted to give a shout-out to them. And then the other one I want to shout-out always, always, always is Faith Publishing, Inc. That is my nonprofit publishing company. I just think it's super awesome, cool. And the reason why I think that is it's not only because I publish stories. I love stories. I love stories. I love poetry. I like coloring books. I like reference books. You name it, I pretty much dig it, right? The great thing about our company is we are the audience. Not only are we the authors, we are also the audience, and we are also responsible for creating a legacy. And I think that's extremely, extremely important. What drives me is our focus, our main goal, honestly, outside of creating opportunities and fellowship opportunities and scholarship opportunities, internship opportunities, just the opportunities to create and kind of come together, is that I want to highlight every story. Every voice matters. Every talent matters. Every story matters. And every story deserves to be told. Even the amazing ones, the funny ones, the uncomfortable ones, they all deserve to be told because that is how we learn. And if we learn, then I think our world is going to be a better place. So, what's great about Faith Publishing is the work inspires me. And then in turn, we get to inspire others. And so, if you are like that, if you are on board with that mission, jump on. Jump on this amazing train. Contact us. You can go to our website. It's faith, F-A-Y-T-H-E, faithpublishing.org. Check out our programs. Probably here, I don't know, in a couple of weeks, I'll probably have a podcast episode that just highlights all of the programs. I am so excited about all of these. Oh my gosh, I'm just like a kid in a candy store. And I just, I'm so excited to share about these. But, I will try to refrain, and I will save that for another day. The highlight, the one I really want to push, though, when I talk about the publishing company, is we have our little hashtag, supporting the writing journey. It's a complete journey. You know, I want to help you when you have those brainstorming. I want to help you when you're trying to find that word. We want to help you when you are wanting to have a book cover, or how should you put this on social media. It is a complete journey, and I love being part of that. And I think the people that are being involved with this company, they share that same vision and that same quest. So, please, please join us, because again, I think everything matters, and it's our responsibility to share that. Alright, so, before I go into my beautiful style studies, we have to say the mantra. Say the mantra! I don't know, today I would like you to say it a little differently. Maybe you could say it to your pet. Maybe you could write one while I say it. Maybe you could, I don't know, picture me saying it in a different dialect, or, you know, using different colloquialisms. I don't know, something, I don't know, I think that would be fun. So, today our mantra is, are you ready? Today, I will face fear. Today, I will be brave. Today, I will struggle. Today, I will grow. Today, I will get through this. Huzzah! Woohoo! Jazz hands! Come on, if that does not get you excited about writing, I don't know what is. I mean, you know, the sound of a typewriter I think is always kind of cool, but come on! Jazz hands? Alright, so today I want to talk about style studies. And I've said this before, and I apologize that I sound like a broken record, but we all know that I'm also a teacher, and I say the same things. I teach the same things over and over again. You would think that I get tired of it, but I don't. And one of the reasons I don't get tired of it is because I like to compare my work, whether my art of teaching, my art of writing, my art of creating, I like to compare it to other styles, right? There's actually a word, I know, here's your word of the day, I'm probably going to destroy the way that I pronounce it, stylometry? Stylometry. Sounds like a really cool geometry. Anyway, it is the application, or it's the study of a linguistic style. And I don't know, I think that's super neat. Recently, I don't know, one, I'm a documentary junkie, and two, I love, I don't know, pretty much any true story. So, not too terribly long ago, my daughter and I were having like a bed out session, and we watched the movie Amadeus. It's older, I don't know, is it in the 80s? I'm pretty sure, I don't know, I don't think I skipped school to see it, but I do remember seeing it in the movie theater. And one of the, there's a scene, there's a scene where everybody is at a costume party, or a ball, or whatever, and they're having kind of like musical chairs, and like, I don't know, truth or dare, or whatever. And so one of the challenges was that Mozart had to play in different styles. So, one, he had to play like Johann Sebastian Bach, and I'm like, sweet, I know who that is. Yeah! Or maybe he had to play like somebody else, and then there's this great big scene where he has to play like Salieri, and Salieri is like the, you know, the arch enemy of the whole entire story. And I got thinking, like, yeah, you know what, that is really, really cool if you can play in different styles. Well, with artwork, you can also do different styles. So like last episode, I discussed about comfort characters, which my daughter loves her character Scrubby, which I think is adorable, right? That is my thing. My son, just to kind of keep things in, I don't know, so fair that I mention everybody. So his is a flying cartoon loaf of bread, which I think is absolutely hysterical. He even has a tattoo of it, which is even more hysterical. But obviously, that is his comfort character. My daughter has Scrubby. So when you have a comfort, or a different type of style, right, so she will take her Scrubby, and then she'll practice, you know, drawing different cartoon styles, right? So maybe she'll draw and make everything look like Charlie Brown and the Peanuts. Or maybe she'll draw and she wants everything to look like a certain video game, you know, whatever. And so I think that you can do that with writing. You can do that with writing as well. And so what's kind of cool about it, you're like, well, why would I want to do that? Well, you get to examine, you get to examine language and story a different way, right? You can play with the way that an author uses an active voice. Maybe you want to totally pull an E.E. Cummings and you just refuse to capitalize everything. That will drive your English teachers, your writing teachers insane, by the way. But, you know, maybe you want to play with plot structure. Like, I am a total fangirl of Mary Shelley. I've got others that are like, I hate her. I'm like, how can you hate her? She's awesome. And her plot structure and the way that she uses letters, I believe it's epistolary, right? You're using letters to tell your story. I will give some people, you know, some, I get it. I get why you wouldn't like Mary Shelley. Because honestly, she uses the word countenance like 69 times in Frankenstein. And that is a little OCD of me to even mention that. But the girl didn't have a thesaurus. I mean, she wrote the whole story on a bet and she kind of kicked some booty. You know what I'm saying? So, you can play with that. Like, I've actually written stories where I want to have a frame within a frame within a frame, like Mary Shelley does with Frankenstein, right? Or, you can also do, and I've mentioned this before in previous episodes, is make your plot structure. I just recently read or listened to, actually, Stephen King's latest book, As You Like It, and I believe, or You Like It Darker. You Like It Darker. And there are, I think there's 12, 11 or 12 different stories. A couple short, like, novellas. Some are really, really short, short stories. And what's cool is that he takes kind of the same structure of a Flannery O'Connor story, which is A Good Man is Hard to Find, which you should definitely read. I use it in my horror class. And so he uses, not the same characters, but he has, like, the same family structure. You know, in both stories, there's a family that's going on, like, a car, a road trip. And then they, you know, encounter somebody, such and such. And so, when I first listened to it, I'm like, wait a minute. This seems really familiar. But, it's not. He didn't plagiarize. He didn't do whatever. But you can definitely see, like, the homage to Flannery O'Connor. Now, King totally pulled a King and made it end like a Stephen King story. And you're just like, wow. So, you can play, you can play with different aspects of writers. For example, like, maybe you wanted the narration style of Poe. Or, maybe you wanted to do Henry Miller. He's one of my favorites. That is, like, one of the most raw, you know, his works. I mean, they are just, that's the only word I can think of. It's just raw. It is real. It is salty. It is just, oh, whatever. You can look at different poetry. You can look at Charles Bukowski. You can look at, oh my gosh, there's so many different ways, right? We have our proverbial box and Mozart in writing. And, which I'm sure that you write, honestly, I just don't think that we get you some exposure, right? I'm pretty sure that we have got some writing Miles Davis or a Wynton Marsalis floating around. Why it's important to play around with style studies. I'm not saying that you have to write everything in the way of Stephen King or everything in the way of Hemingway or whatever. Why you want to try this? Because you're exercising. When you're writing, writing is a craft. It is not, one, it is not easy. And I think it's kind of, in some cases, it's kind of like an extreme sport. Like, I can be physically exhausted by writing. I can be excited. I want to scream. I want to throw things, just like at a sporting event, right? So, you're constantly exercising. You're exercising and you're working out your writing muscles. So, one of the reasons why you want to play a style study, kind of as an exercise, is it's going to maximize your writing. It's going to help you identify various dimensions, per se. Maybe, like, your nuances of language. Maybe you just love how Edgar Allan Poe twists and turns, and it's just absolutely delicious, and you want to do such and such. Or, maybe you're really, really into a certain genre of writing, and the more that you see how the writers there have used language, that's going to help you just connect, I think it's going to help you connect to the readers of that genre. I did a lot of research prior to teaching my horror class, because not everybody writes horror the same way. Now, also, what's kind of cool is that when you look at a certain genre, it's not going to be just one fold. It's going to be like one hell of a Venn diagram, right? It's going to have a lot of complexities, and I think whenever you're practicing those style studies, or that style-ometry, you get to kind of see that relationship that you have between language and that genre. I don't know, come on, that sounds so exciting! So, here, let me give you a couple of examples. I did talk earlier about Stephen King and Flannery O'Connor, and I've also talked earlier about writers need to read. Writers need to, like, I consider myself, in some cases, kind of a sponge, and also kind of like a detective. I am constantly looking for clues, and I'm looking to see how things work, and I'm analyzing, and I'm just trying to soak everything up. So, I'll just give you a few, and this might help you out. Ernest Hemingway, Papa Hemingway, I know I've talked about him a lot. By the way, Ken Burns has an amazing documentary on Hemingway, and you're just, wow, a complex guy. I just, I don't know, I'm drawn to the way that the guy works. If I wanted to write like him, I would, if you look at his language, it's very journalistic in style. It's actually, like, his sentences are, they're not overly complex, but they're extremely informative. They're concise. They are objective. And here's your little useless trivia. He used to actually be a journalist. He used to write for the Kansas City Star. So, he's not really too far away from Kansas, I'm just saying, right? So, if I wanted to write like him, that is one thing that I would try to emulate. I mean, I think there's been several times, and I don't know too much about it, but he talks about, like, the iceberg theory. He keeps it, like, he knows, he trusts his reader to understand that there's more of the iceberg underneath the water. So, when he's describing something, it's very concise, it's very to the point, it's very objective. That is the point that he's describing the top of that iceberg. So, it's kind of interesting that you can start seeing, like, influences to people's writing. So, with him, you know, being a journalist, definitely, definitely a thing. Mary Shelley, which I also mentioned before, and I'm totally not knocking her about the word countenance. I will tell you that every single person that I've ever taught Frankenstein to, they better know the definition of countenance. Seriously. Not just that. What's cool about her, one, she was so young when she did it, and her plot structure, and, oh my gosh, not to mention that whole bet, that whole story about the bet of a ghost story. I think that the aspect of Mary Shelley that I enjoy most about her, her work, is that she brings up philosophical questions. And, one, people didn't bring those up at that time, and certainly a woman did not bring that up. So, you know, she was like the original hippie chick. Like, she goes there, and she, I just, I don't know. I love that she brings those up. I like that she can bring up parenting, and responsibility, and how one handles coping skills, you know. So, I think all of those are philosophical questions. That's something that I would definitely take from her. You can take Agatha Christie, if you want to think about detective novels. I would, I don't know, you could do, apparently she was really into archaeology, and she uses a lot of psychological trauma. Now, I'm not saying that that's a good thing, but those are kind of aspects that she uses in her writing. Not just, you know, constructing an amazing detective story. You could have Zora Neale, the book Their Eyes Are Watching God. Her use of colloquialism, like the Southern dialect, something. Hunter S. Thompson, oh my gosh, people need to read his book. I've come across a couple of his articles. I think most people will probably know Fear of Loathing in Las Vegas. I'm pretty sure Johnny Depp is the one that's in the movie about it. But Hunter S. Thompson used to write for Sports Illustrated, which I think is hysterical. But what's kind of cool, he had this thing called gonzo journalism. Now, where you have Ernest Hemingway, who was actually objective about, you know, something that he can tell you facts. Objective journalism, Hunter S. Thompson was the complete opposite. He wrote without objectivity. I just think that's kind of cool. Another one that kind of comes to mind, and there's tons, there's tons of things that you guys could do, is Toni Morrison. Obviously, she's an amazing writer, Pulitzer Prize winner. What's kind of neat about her is that she read a lot of Jane Austen and Tolstoy. And what's kind of cool, if you want to have an academic geeky moment, is you can kind of compare her sentence structure. And even her uses of analogies is just delicious. What's kind of cool, the one thing I think about her is that she is true to her time. And if I was going to attempt to write like her, that is what I would do. So here's what I'm going to do. I'll leave the challenge to you to study your stylometry, right? There's your stylometry lesson, your application of linguistic style, your writing style, right? So maybe you want to be like Hemingway. Maybe you want to be like Hunter S. Thompson. Maybe you want to told people in advocacy. I challenge you to flex your writing muscle, right? You're only going to become stronger when you practice different styles, different genres, and you're pushing yourself as a writer. So that is my call of action for you. I'm Candice Bates with a cup of creativity in a literary lounge, a place where writing doesn't have to suck. I really look forward to reading your next work. Until next time. Thank you.